Fall 2003 Video Card Roundup - Part 2: High End Shootout
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on October 7, 2003 5:30 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness
So, as I'm writing this, the phrase "be careful what you wish for" comes to mind. I had my reasons for not wanting to benchmark this game, and in order for me to feel comfortable with handing out the numbers I need to touch on some of the more important issues. The inclusion of TRAOD in this benchmark suite is based on the demand of the community (as everything here always will be). But it's also our duty to try to make sure the information you get here is complete (which is a daunting task for this particular game).
Our initial thinking was that TRAOD simply isn't a very good game, nor would it be representative of future DX9 games. The graphics features are no where near as impressive as something along the lines of Half Life 2 and high dynamic range effects, and it looks more like a DX7 game running on DX9 shaders. It is our opinion that this game won't be heavily played and is more of just a synthetic benchmark people want to see in order to try to predict future performance.
Unfortunately, future performance can't be predicted until we have games from the future. No one seems to want to lend me a time machine, so I can't get those numbers yet. Looking back though, I can offer this advice: don't spend $500 on a video card until the game you want to play on it comes out. Trying to buy something now in order to be ready for games of the future only means that you won't have that money to spend on the newest best card that's out at that point. I also feel comfortable saying that TRAOD performance is a predictor of nothing but TRAOD performance.
In taking this stance, we have decided to do things a little differently than most other sites when it comes to TRAOD. We have turned this game into a sort of stress test that pushes the cards as far as they can go in order to only test the real world impact of DX9 Pixel Shaders. We did four tests at each resolution in order to see the performance differences with and without PS 2.0 and with and without AA. For each card, we use the application to set all the features and left the drivers alone. Part of the reasoning behind this was that AA in Tomb Raider only works if set by the application. Anisotropic filtering is selectable in the game, and was left off for all tests. The reason we check AA and not AF is that AF happens during texturing, but AA is implemented via shaders in TRAOD so it stresses the card in more of the way we want to test. But since we are comparing performance of each card to itself in order to see a performance delta, the actual settings shouldn't be a problem. Beyond3d has some extensive documentation of the TRAOD settings and all the options. If you'd like to learn more, I would point you to them.
For our tests, the only really important information is that we use the NVIDIA Cg compiler rather than the DX9 HLSL default compiler (there was no performance difference between the two on NVIDIA cards for the most part, only image quality improvements).
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Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 21, 2003 - link
Why are they using Flash to do this. I can't see the performance charts (or whatever they are)?Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 14, 2003 - link
what a crap this article was. More games - sure. More data. Bot no brains to interprete it right, obviously.Anonymous User - Monday, October 13, 2003 - link
#114Its more than just difference in visuals. By removing some of the visuals the card will run faster. The Nvidia drivers for example do not do trilinear filtering in dx they do some fake bilinear. That makes the card better than it really is.
The whining is how the reveiwers missed all this stuff. People are not getting the true story here.
Anonymous User - Monday, October 13, 2003 - link
Okay now I'm new here and all but DAMN do some of you whine! You act like any visual diffrences between the Nvidia cards and the Ati (of which I can't see at all) are astronomically huge! It's not, this is the first and last time I post here looks like half of the people here are fanboys!Anonymous User - Monday, October 13, 2003 - link
I don't understand why the obvious differences in IQ in the Aquamark 3 4xAA/8xAF shots, for example, are totally ignored by the reviewer.Just looked at the fuzziness in the plants surrounding the explosion in the nvidia shot.
Anonymous User - Sunday, October 12, 2003 - link
Well I hope it was worth it.You spend all that time on a review and you end up getting caught being in someones back pocket.
Guess you can't have your cake and eat it to :(
Anonymous User - Saturday, October 11, 2003 - link
Here's is part of an addendum to the 3DCenter article direclty addressing this comparison:"AnandTech made an extremely extensive article about the performance and image quality of the current high-end graphic cards like Radeon 9800XT and GeForceFX 5950 Ultra (NV38). Beside the game benchmarks with 18 games, the image quality tests made with each of those games are strongly worth to be mentioned. AnandTech uses the Catalyst 3.7 on ATi side and the Detonator 52.14 on the nVidia side to compare the image quality. In contrast to the statements of our youngest driver comparison, AnandTech didn’t notice any general differences of the image quality between the Detonator 52.14 and 45.23 and therefore AnandTech praises the new driver a little into the sky.
This however not even absolutely contradicts itself with our realizations. The nVidia-"optimizations" of the anisotropic filter with texture stages 1 till 7 in Control panel mode (only a 2x anisotropic filter is uses, regardless if there were made higher settings) are only to find with proper searching for it, besides most image quality comparisons by AnandTech were concerned without the anisotropic filter and therefore it’s impossible to find any differences on those pictures. The generally forced "optimization" of the trilinear filter into a pseudo trilinear filter by the Detonator 52.14 is besides nearly not possible to see on fixed images of real games, because the trilinear filter was created in order to prevent nearly only the MIP-Banding which can be seen in motion.
Thus it can be stated that the determined "optimizations" of the Detonator 52.14 won’t be recognized with the view of screenshots, if you do not look for them explicitly (why however AnandTech awards the driver 52.14 a finer filter quality than the driver 51.75 is a mystery for us, then the only difference between them is a correctly working Application mode of the Detonator 52.14). Thus the "optimizations" of nVidia are not to be really seen, whereby there is also a clear exception as for example Tron 2.0 (screenshots will follow). Whether this is now a reason to excuse the "optimizations" of nVidia about it, one can surely argue."
All on-line computer journalists should strive to inform their viewing public like these folks do.
Once again: 51/52.XX nvidia drivers do *not* apply trilinear filtering in D3D when AF is on. The 51.75 at least, applies trilinear to the first (0) stage, though not *AT ALL* to any other stage - the 52 series does not apply trilinear filtering to any stage in D3D, regardless.
Bing! Bing! Try again!
May I suggest the filtering tester used by 3dCenter, and perhaps a mipmap shading program (as used by everyone in the known universe), and rthdribl to discern *ACTUAL* image quality via high dynamic range light source rendering.
http://www.daionet.gr.jp/~masa/rthdribl/index.html
Anonymous User - Saturday, October 11, 2003 - link
http://www.3dcenter.de/artikel/detonator_52.14/ind...Take a look at this if you think the 5x.xx drivers have the same image quality of the 45s.
Anonymous User - Saturday, October 11, 2003 - link
The only thing I give Anand credit for is allowing us freely write about his review. I mean he did not have to allow us to reply in a open forum.After reading it I am not at all suprised at the heat he is taking, I hope he was not either.
The review had potential but was squandered.
Todays cards all all fast enough to do Dx8 games.
The question is can they do it will all the goodies turned on?
The main reason to buy a ATI 96-9800/5900U is to clean up the graphics but not at the expense of speed. If you don't care about image quality stick with your GF4 or 8500 as they both are horrid vs the new gen cards.
An old Gforce 4 kicks butt in mnay games so long as you don't have FSAA turned on.
Most people know that the 5x.xx detonator drivers do reduce image quality in many areas. This is not a driver bug its what Nvidia choose to keep pace. Image quality is much more subjective than FPS. People are not buying 400.00 video cards for the speed alone.
Anand glossed over/hid quality issues, the one area where subtle reductions here and there add up to large FPS gains.
People will say so what the XT gets recommended in the end why bitch?
Well its the principle, The review made the 5900 seem much closer to the XT than it actually is.
When a driver (beta one at that) improves speed that much it deserves a much closer inspection than what Anad gave.
Someone threw Anand a pass but he dropped the ball :(
Anonymous User - Saturday, October 11, 2003 - link
I didn't care for this review for the following reasons:Many comments on IQ in part 1, but no followup in part 2. There were so many comments that they needed to be mentioned, even if it was to say that they discovered it was some wrong setting and they fixed it.
Small cropped compressed images used for IQ comparison. If the image is compressed how can we judge it? The only way to present IQ comparisons to the reader is to show them the exact images the reviewer saw, without compression or cropping.
Apples to apples. All of the benchmarks for all games should have been done in the same format unless it was impossible to achieve certain settings on a given card at a given resolution. Changing the metric for TR:AOD was a bad idea. Both parts should also have been done on the same system. For all we know the ignored IQ issues from part 1 could have been due to the AGP implementation on the first board. We just don't know.
Gunmetal is also a very poor DX9 benchmark, since it relies on VS 2.0 and PS 1.1 only. Since most of the benefits of DX9, and the controversies for that matter, revolve around PS 2.0 this benchmark is not a good exemplar of DX9 performance. I also find the fact that Gunmetal was co-developed by Nvidia something that needs examination. IHVs have no place in developing benchmarks, they should stick to technology demos.
Now I don't know if the 52.14 drivers do what the article says they do or not. I know Digit-Life said they gave up to a 20% improvement in some cases, and some improvement is certainly credible. However, this article as written does not support the conclusions that the 52.14 provide significant performance boosts with no IQ loss. I am not commenting on whether they do or not perform as advertised, only that you cannot draw that conclusion from the article.